The Integration of Online Information in Lifestyle Politics

This research aimed to explore how young Dutch citizens get news about the world online and use the information they have in relation to their political participation activities, whether conventional or unconventional political participation. The main focus of this research was on young Dutch citizens’ political consumption and how that is linked to their web browsing activities. Therefore, the following main research question was explored: how is the political consumption of young Dutch citizens linked to their web browsing activities? A thematic analysis was conducted after nine in-depth interviews. Furthermore, a new Google Chrome extension, Web Historian (Version 1, 2015), was used as a tool to visualize the participants’ web history to provide an in-depth analysis of their web browsing activities in relation to their political consumption. The participants were asked through a survey to enter the project in which they had to send their web history data. Hereafter, they were asked to participate in an interview in which they also reflected upon their visualizations to achieve more in-depth results. The main findings in this research stated that young Dutch citizens actively use online news to inform themselves about politics. Social media is a big contributor to their news consumption, however their social media use was not linked to information about political consumption, in particular ‘buycotting’. On the contrary, it was linked to their information consumption regarding traditional politics and election time. Another finding regarding election time, is that the participants often use Voting Advice Applications (Stemwijzer.nl) to assist them in their final decision. Furthermore, this research found that the participants do not avoid information due to political beliefs, rather seek for opposite political views. The only thing that is avoided are immorally and unethical images or videos under the participant from immigrant backgrounds. The last important finding is that the participants did not have a sense of what average political interest means nor engagement, as they often compared themselves with their social environment.